About Me

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Magazines of my time Part 3: The 1980s … NME, Smash Hits, & Rip It Up

By 1979, my life as a high school student
was all but over. I was sitting School Certificate and putting in just enough
effort to scrape a “pass” in all five of my subjects except History, which I passed
with some aplomb, simply because I loved that subject way more than any of the
others. The plan was that I’d do 6th form, my University Entrance year,
in 1980, but there were a couple of stumbling blocks in my path that I’d eventually
fail to overcome.

The first was that, at 15, all of the
things that had shaped my world up until that point, suddenly started to seem
less important. I’d more or less lost interest in playing football, and while I
was still involved with the school team, I was no longer being looked at for
representative team selection. I was off the radar, and in truth, I lacked the
physicality to play at any higher level. Shoot! magazine (see Part 2) had
started to lose its appeal, and things like Paul McCartney’s Wings, Pink Floyd’s
The Wall, and this crazy thing called punk rock – an unfathomable mix, I’ll
grant you – became far more important distractions to fill my head with.

It was probably around 1979 when I first
bought my first music and pop culture magazine. I’m fairly certain it was an
Australian publication called Popscore, which enjoyed a brief foray into the
New Zealand market around that time. It was a glossy, and I can recall cutting out
pictures – one of McCartney stands out – and plastering them all over my school
books. I’m still doing something similar on Facebook, and on this blog, today.

I’d started doing after school jobs, and
started buying music with my hard earned dosh. I had also started saving money
for what would prove to be the second major stumbling block in a forlorn
attempt to complete my education (by passing University Entrance) – a family
trip to the UK and the USA for several months smack bang in the middle of 1980.
The plan had changed, and I was supposed to study from a distance, but it never
quite happened.

What that trip did however, was cement my
burgeoning relationship with popular culture. Lifestyles, tribes, music, and
fashion in London, Brighton, and Glasgow – the places we stayed or visited most
while in the UK – were a huge eye-opener for the recently turned 16-year-old
me. Punks, Mods, Skinheads, Rude Boys, tartan bondage pants, DMs, the music of
The Specials, The Clash, The Jam, and The Police, blaring out from shop
doorways and pub jukeboxes … this was all very different to the world I’d known
in Palmerston North. And it was at this time I discovered a music newspaper
called the New Musical Express, which I started buying as often as I could.

The late '70s, through the 1980s, was a
special time for the NME, which found itself at the vanguard of music criticism
during the rise of punk and post-punk. Exceptional writers like Paul Morley,
Tony Parsons, and Julie Burchill, were all plying their trade at the paper
during this period, and the NME was streets ahead of Melody Maker and Sounds,
which were its two main rivals in the market – at least in terms of non-glossy UK-based
weekly newsprint publications. In the second half of the decade key writers
included the equally entertaining likes of Adrian Thrills, Stuart Cosgrove, and
Paolo Hewitt.

The quality of the writing – insightful
analysis of ever-changing and quickly evolving scenes, and all of the context
around that, plus witty album and gig reviews, etc – from staffers was one
thing, but the letters-to-the-editor page (or ‘The Big Bad Read’) was something
else entirely, and probably where I spent most of my time. It was clear NME
readers also held firm opinions and weren't afraid to share them. Often at the
cost of a scathing reply from said editor. I also loved browsing the
classifieds, and the charts page, with a special shout out to the
history-nut-centric ‘Lest We Forget’ charts of years/decades past. And of
course there was always Fred Dollar’s ‘Fred Fact’, a tiny morsel of weekly musical
eccentricity to ponder and/or marvel at.

For whatever reason, or reasons, the NME
has fallen away badly over the past couple of decades and it no longer commands
the same level of reach or influence. If anything, for readers of my generation
say, the (now) magazine is something of a joke and a sad pale shadow of what it
once represented.

While the NME was the champion of all
things indie, political, and cutting edge, fans of straight up unadulterated
pop music could get their fix from Smash Hits, a magazine that catered for the
pop charts. And that meant for much of the first half of the 1980s, it was very
much a synthpop-centric type of publication, which is where I came in.

Published fortnightly, Smash Hits was a
colourful glossy crammed full of posters, lyric sheets, and digestible tidbits.
It was almost tabloid-esque at times. Something to be consumed and tossed away,
rather than studiously pored over and/or collected. It had its own little niche
corner of the market. For a while it did have a specialist indie page, and one
dedicated to disco, but mostly it was a rock snob’s nightmare and it concerned
itself only with whatever was happening on top 40 radio at any given time. To
its credit, the magazine survived for nearly three decades before market forces
and falling advertising revenues saw it close in 2006.

My relationship with Smash Hits was only ever
intermittent, that whole early 80s synthpop thing being its main draw, but I
was still buying it as late as 1983, because I recall having a Tears For Fears
poster/lyric page for ‘Pale Shelter’ (removed from the mag) pinned to a bedroom
wall in one of my first flats. I can laugh about now, but at the time it all
seemed so deadly serious.

Trivia Fact: Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant was
once an assistant editor at Smash Hits. Then he released ‘West End Girls’ and
the rest is history …

By the time I’d left school, found a job,
left home, and established a set of like-minded gig-going companions (let’s say
by 1983, for argument’s sake), I had become aware of Rip It Up, a local music paper,
a monthly, that was free to pick up at “record shops” (quaint term) across the
country.

Rip It Up started life in 1977, the
brainchild of local music identity Murray Cammick, and while it wasn’t New
Zealand’s first rock/pop culture periodical, it was the first of any real
significance for my generation. It wasn’t exclusively about local music –
interviews, album reviews, gig reviews – but it was the only place, beyond token
coverage in mainstream newspapers, we could read about local bands, local gigs,
and everything else to do with “us”. That said, it had a balanced mix of the
local and the international, and was fairly widescreen in scope and genre.

Initially, it was quite rudimentary in its
design and layout – it was advert-dependent and free, after all – with one-word
section headers – “records” (reviews), “live” (gig reviews), “briefs” (short
news snippets), and “letters” (self-explanatory, and only occasionally
NME-standard for hilarity). It had a genuine fanzine quality about it.

I’d usually start at the “rumours” section,
which took the reader on a tour around the country, covering odds and ends,
news and gossip, with focus placed on each the four main centres. It offered a
summary of what had been happening in each location, and what we could expect
in the way of releases, tours, and events during the month ahead.

From 1977, through the decade that followed,
Rip It Up was a newsprint publication, mostly black and white, with a splash of
colour reserved for the front cover and the occasional advert. But in 1991, the
title underwent a facelift and a change in format, morphing into a glossy
magazine, with a sale price attached. And while that’s all fair enough, and
perfectly logical, something that ensured its longer term survival, it’s fair
to say my own interest in the paper/magazine had fallen away by this time. Not
because there was a cost associated with it, but because it had become less
concerned with the grassroots, and far more mainstream in its approach.

So far, all of the titles I’ve covered off
in this series – with the exception of Rip It Up – have been UK-based
publications, but in the next post I’ll expand those horizons just a little.
Still looking at the 1980s, but taking a short detour into rather more exotic
climes …Read Part 1 hereRead Part 2 here